social media

Airbnb. Dropbox. Slack. We call them unicorns, but the fact that these former startups with $1B+ valuations are becoming less and less rare means that there’s never been a better time than now to take a lesson from their playbooks.

Even better, you can use the same tools they did to build their customer bases and achieve rapid growth.

Before the days of social media – before viral videos and sponsored ads – was the natural social interaction between consumers: the recommendation of a product or service from one person to the next.

Word of mouth marketing (WOMM) is the organic communication of information from one person to another about a brand, product or service. It is most often influenced and driven by a positive interaction that an individual has had with a brand. WOMM is nothing new, and has been reviewed and discussed in a number of articles. More recently, there has been strong evidence for WOMM to succeed in the credit union space. With customer satisfaction levels at an all-time high for credit unions, and with 82% of credit union marketers believing that referrals are the most effective customer acquisition method, customer referral programs just make sense.

So: You’ve tried banner ads, sponsored Facebook posts and pay-per-click ads and have been a little dismayed at the return on your investment. Your digital marketing methods might be increasing visitors to your e-commerce site or providing a slight boost in revenue, and now you’re asking yourself: how can you grow your consumer engagement and get noticeable results?

Over the past several years, social media has evolved and grown into one of the most powerful tools available to marketing professionals. In our digital age, virtually all businesses around the world depend on social media as a marketing tool to some extent. In fact, if a company doesn’t promote itself through social media platforms, many customers or potential clients could very well consider the company to be less reliable and not as professional than other businesses that utilize the power of social media. Along with the explosion of social media, social referral marketing has become an increasingly common and extremely effective means of marketing a business.